Cancer remains one of the most devastating diseases worldwide. According to the cancer report by American Cancer society, cancer remains the second leading cause of death in US accounting for approximately 5.8 million of deaths in 2013 (Siegel, Naishadham et al. 2013). Current management of cancer, including surgery, chemotherapy and radiation, faces multiple challenges. These challenges include severe adverse side effect and poor effectiveness, especially when metastasis occurs. Early diagnosis and targeted therapy are well known to improve survival rate and the quality of life for cancer patients. The major challenges of cancer are being diagnosed at late stages resulting metastatic and limited selectivity of chemotherapy. A major challenge of cancer therapy is preferential destruction of malignant cells with sparing of normal tissue.
Multiple, complementary techniques for tumor detection, including magnetic resonance, scintigraphic and optical-imaging, are under active development. Each approach has particular strengths and advantages. Optical imaging includes measurement of absorption of endogenous molecules (e.g. hemoglobin) or administered dyes, detection of bioluminescence in preclinical models, and detection of fluorescence from endogenous fluorophores or from targeted exogenous molecules. Conventional quantum dots (QD) have been of great potential in bioimaging and diagnosis applications. However, the safety issue limited their usage in clinical. Graphene and graphene quantum dots have seen attention as useful materials in a range of applications, including optics, electronics, and biomedical applications. Among them, biomedical applications of GQDs represent a relatively new but fast growing area, for example, bioimaging, biosensor materials, and drug delivery.
Targeted imaging of cancer remains an important but elusive goal. Such imaging could provide early diagnosis, detection of metastasis, aid treatment planning and benefit therapeutic monitoring. By leveraging the expanding list of specific molecular characteristics of tumors and their microenvironment, molecular imaging also has the potential to generate tumor-specific reagents. But many efforts at tumor-specific imaging are fraught by nonspecific localization of the putative targeted agents, eliciting unacceptably high background noise.
Cancer therapies have also advanced considerably during the last few decades. However, they are also still hampered by nonspecific delivery of anti-tumor agents to normal cells, resulting in horrendous side effects for patients. This lack of specificity also results in lower efficacy of treatments due to the want of a capability to deliver active agents in a focused manner where they are most needed, i.e. to cancer cells alone.
It is therefore an object of this disclosure to provide materials, compositions, and methods for combined therapy and diagnosis (theranostics) of various cancers and related disorders.
It is also an object of this disclosure to provide materials compositions, and methods to improve specificity and/or efficacy for treatment of various cancers and related disorders.
An additional object of the disclosure is to provide materials compositions, and methods to simultaneously deliver an active agent to and monitor the treatment of various cancers and related disorders.